Put Yourself in Someone Else’s Shoes

We’ve heard this phrase before: Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. But nobody ever explains how.

In my case, I would hear it when I was caught making fun of someone else. Child’s play with an adult trying to correct me. I find it interesting that those comments I made stemmed from some adult being an ass in the first place. Perhaps they thought the children weren’t listening. Children have always been known to copy the older people in their lives.

My upbringing brought me close to a lot of people in a lot of places, so I did, at least, have the benefit of that. No small-town life for me.

So, just how would you put your feet into someone else’s shoes?

You could read about them. Pick someone from another country or another economic class or even another period of time. If you are an adult, go volunteer somewhere to see, up close and personal, who these other people are. You might learn something.

Track your own ancestors if you know anything about them. I would be reaching out to folks with military or naval experience. I’d be reaching back to Ireland, to England, and to Germany. I’d be reaching back to war, farming, and probably to poverty.

What if you don’t know anything about your own family? Are there people still alive you could ask? Maybe, as a writer, you could make a project of compiling stories from times gone by. I can remember some from when I was a child and still had those older people to talk to. Neddie, my great-grandmother, told me about the baby they took into their family. No legal papers signed. Nothing authorized. It was a baby who needed a mother. Neddie did that. I don’t know who that baby became in my family. But Neddie said they were there, and their children have a place with my family too. If only I knew who they were.

People lie all the time. The stuff you read and movies you see might actually have historical significance. Then again, some of it might not. How do you tell the difference? I think you’ve got to read a lot to sift through all of it.

For instance, the stories of the western United States in the late 1800s — a time when people were moving west — were romanticized into tales of gunfighters and rustlers, even though the reality was harsh.

However, even now, folks from the western United States are considered more adventurous than people living in the east. There are even some people not that far from where I live who think anyone from California is a goofball, hippie, woo-woo sort of person. You know who you are.

And I will stop talking like that right now. Nothing worse than spewing negative stuff into the air to spoil someone’s day—your own, for starters.

Speaking of woo-woo, I’ve heard folks say that if a person seems drawn to one period of history over any other, they might have had a past life from that time. I think that’s true enough. One thing I do believe in is that we’ve all had past lives. I don’t think I know any new souls. Typically, it’s been said that new souls are mostly concerned with survival skills, and nobody that I know is living in primitive conditions. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong. It's just something I heard, and thinking of a pull toward any particular time gone by is sort of fun, like an echo of the past.

Another way to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is to begin eating what they eat. There are tons of cookbooks out there. I especially like the ones that include family stories and family recipes that reach back generations. Another way is to go look for cooking stories on YouTube.

In fact, I can’t think of a better gift for family members than to compile a bunch of old family recipes. Neddie’s corn fritters. My father-in-law's crab cakes. I had to follow him around, grabbing at his elbow so I could see how much Old Bay seasoning he was putting in. My mother’s meatloaf. Again, no measuring, but I remember she used three different kinds of meat: beef, pork, and veal. I don’t eat veal, so I just use hamburger and ground pork. It’s not quite the same, but it comes close. Food is one of the easiest ways to step into someone else’s life.

Tell me what you think. And thanks for reading.

Pauline Evanosky